Scientists at Berkeley Lab weren’t setting out to take beautiful pictures of molecules breaking and reforming chemical bonds, this just happened to be a surprising side benefit of trying to cause the reactions (Source).

“‘Nobody has ever taken direct, single-bond-resolved images of individual molecules, right before and immediately after a complex organic reaction,’ Fischer”, a staff scientist in Berkeley Lab and professor at the University of California – Berkeley, said (Source).

These images improve scientists’ understanding of chemical reactions and will continue to do so in the future as technologies advance.